Right Strikes Out on START

Fresh up on DOD Buzz, KReif and I throw dem bows and rebut conservative critics of New START. Grabber grafs:

The gist of Needham’s complaint is that the “many noted and respected foreign policy observers [who] have serious concerns with the treaty” are being ignored. He then cites the fears of a Heritage analyst, three former George W. Bush administration appointees, and a former Republican senator who just happens to be a Heritage distinguished fellow. These are all great Americans, to be sure. But citing their criticisms of New START is a bit like citing professor Noam Chomsky’s criticisms of the Bush administration – there is a slight selection bias problem.

In reality, the remarkable thing about New START is the wide-ranging bipartisan consensus in support of the agreement. For starters, Secretary of Defense (and former Cold Warrior) Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Michael Mullen, all the Service Chiefs, STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton, and Missile Defense Agency Director Lt. Gen. Patrick O’Reilly strongly support the treaty on the grounds that it limits and allows the monitoring of Russia’s still enormous nuclear arsenal.  Keep in mind that these military leaders, who have access to all the pertinent intelligence information and analysis, assumed their current positions under the Presidency of George W. Bush.

[snip]

Needham is right that New START should be judged on whether it makes the United States safer.  Our entire military leadership and countless former Republican and Democratic statesmen say that it will. They back it because the treaty’s legally-binding limits and monitoring and verification provisions will cap the growth of Russia’s deployed forces and give us an essential window into their composition and location that we haven’t had since START I expired last December.  And the more stable and predictable the U.S.-Russian nuclear relationship, the better off our allies are – which explains why so many of them support New START.

If New START is not ratified there will continue to be no verifiable limits on Russia’s nuclear forces and U.S. inspectors will remain in the United States and not be on the ground in Russia inspecting Russia’s nuclear arsenal.  As STRATCOM Commander Gen. Kevin Chilton put it, this would be “the worst of both possible worlds.”